Technically speaking, this isn’t really a pilot’s log because we aren’t even on the Huckleberry right now. That is to say, the Huckleberry and it’s crew are in two different locations on Jabba the Hutt’s flagship “The Anti-Salter”. Strange name for a ship, I know. The Hutt’s have a peculiar hatred for sodium, but hey, it’s their ship so whatever.

I don’t like being locked away down here in the servant’s quarters away from the Huckleberry. We just got that ship kitted out pretty nice and now it’s locked down for the next three months as we cruise through the Outer Rim playing for Jabba. I guess at least we’re getting our foot in the door on the jizz scene. If we can pull off this three month stint, Jas will be spending most of his time turning down gigs for us. We could maybe get a couple holo-recording deals and start touring the core world circuit. Living large! Then I can actually start affording some other things besides kettleweed noodles.

The Anti-Salter is taking some getting used to. For starters, it’s really old and it’s designed for Hutts. The servant’s quarters are down in the bilge and it’s where all the slime water filters down to. It smells something fierce and the locks on the doors are actually mechanical. It’s like something you would fine on a primitive pre-space world. Also, no holonet access, not even local ship holonet. This deal is getting worse and worse every day. Our main point of contact down here is a Twi’lek named Tuso. He sort of manages all the help. He showed us our room and relayed to us some important rules about working on “The Anti-Salter”:

#1. Don’t be late – We sort of already screwed this one up apparently.
#2. Don’t go to the Red Zones – Red Zone is a synonym for places on the ship that you would actually want to go hang out in.
#3. Don’t talk to the entourage – basically anyone who isn’t stuck down here with us
#4. Don’t ask where we are at or where we are going – cause those aren’t natural questions a band would want to know when they are performing. “Hello Mystery Place! Are you ready to Jizz!” or “We are so happy to be playing here in Mystery Place. It really is a special city/town/bar/world you have here.”

I’m sure Tuso will come up with some more rules as we make our way around the Outer Rim. When we went up to play last night though, I looked out the Gala viewing deck where we were performing and almost pissed myself. It looks like we were traveling through hyper space as I expected but it also looked like we were flying through a nebula. If I had to guess, I would say it was the Jewel of Nal Hutta. The very same nebula in which Zelda’s strange medallion pointed us to. Now we just need to convince Jabba to let us leave the ship once we get to whatever is in the center of this astronomical gravity maze. Jas is working on it so I’m pretty sure we’ll end up getting the info that Kaz wants.

The real problem is that two IT guys ended up beheaded down the hallway from us and a comm engineer has gone missing. Tuso is worthless for intel so we went down and investigated it ourselves. Security is labeling it a double homicide, but they didn’t even notice that the Twi’lek engineer was missing until we made our way into the bunk room. Blood everywhere, plus the heads were missing. Seriously! How do two guys behead each other and then hide the heads? Smells like a cover up. We went to investigate further in the Cargo Hold. Upon interrogating Beelo-Beelo, the Gungan Cargo Supervisor, we discovered that 1) Beelo is pretty sensitive about non-Gungans speaking in the Gungan dialect and 2) three carbonite crates had been thawed out. Turns out the containers held two assassin droids and Kraxis, the bounty hunter who’s been trying to kill us for weeks now! I guess that’s what you get for hiring a Gungan to be in charge of your cargo hold. Needless to say, Beelo freaked out, insulted Shorty who then in turn gut-punched him, only to have Beelo take off into the shadows of the cargo bay. I don’t think Beelo will be bothering us for now though. His head’s going to roll when Jabba finds out who let Trilock’s prize bounty hunter on board Jabba’s flag ship.

Val and R7 went to work real quick on tracking down the assassins. R7 sliced into the ship’s network and traced Praxis’ droids. Looks like he kidnapped Reela, the comms engineer, to gain access to the ship’s controls. Clever and deadly, but not clever enough. R7 overcame Kraxis’ network counter measures and we pinpointed Reela’s location. Val and Jas convinced Tuso to provide us with a strike force and we stealthed our way up to the room and took out those assassin droids holding Reela. That was a close call. One of those droids got a surface to air missile shot off and nearly killed Jas. Shorty made quick work of them once he got in there swinging his vibro ax. It’s too bad Gloomy wasn’t there to see it. I hope he gets over whatever flu he’s got. It can’t be fun hanging out in a bunk all day.

Turns out, while we were saving Reela and taking out the assassin droids, Kraxis was making a run at Greeba up in the Hutt slime bath level. Doesn’t Kraxis know that’s a red zone? He’s going to get in a lot of trouble. Perhaps Kraxis left a clue or two for us to follow up on. We will have to wait and see. For now, we’ve got to go practice our set. There’s another show coming up in a couple hours and we don’t want to suck.